Show Notes: 5 Gigs / 5 Venues — Marnie Stern, SPRINTS, Tropical Fuck Storm, Duster, Osees
To whom it may interest,
In the interest of full disclosure, I struggled to capture my thoughts on a series of shows I attended from late September till late October. As is often the case when fatigued by my full-time vocation and other responsibilities, the ability to simply hone in on the correct words and capture properly the fleeting experience of a live gig sometimes eludes me. I used to write show reviews all the time, but I’m rusty and trying desperately to shake off the cobwebs.
These are the details I remember about five gigs in five different venues that I attended about a month or so ago. Please enjoy.
Maneka
Marnie Stern
Johnny Brenda’s
Philadelphia, PA
9/25/24
The last time I saw Marnie Stern at Johnny Brenda’s, she’d been touring for what would be her last album for a decade, 2103’s The Chronicles Of Marnia. Following last year’s The Comeback Kid, Stern—along with drummer Nick Ferrante and guitarist Jon Gonnelli—is thankfully back on the touring circuit, the entertaining banter, finger-tapped electricity, and wild rhythmic mathematics fully intact.
Brooklyn’s MANEKA (pronounced “Monica”) provided warmup, attendance gradually accumulating as the trio performed. Their tempos varied from mid to low, seared melodies with amped-up bridges that I really enjoyed. Based on the performance I had merch intentions, but I didn’t see any items available.
“Hi, Philleeeeeee!”
An evening of light comedy and math rock with Stern means that you’ll be impressed with her frenetic fret play and amused by onstage back-and-forth between songs. Stern opened the set with The Comeback Kid’s “Seeing Is Believing,” a song readily familiar to the members of the evening’s audience who’d been newly indoctrinated into the world of Marnia. Two songs in and Stern’s leather jacket had to come off, its obstructive sleeves complicating the want to look cool while being instrumentally proficient.
“Is it better to be comfortable or to look cool?” Gonnelli asked.
“It’s to look cool,” Stern quickly answered, immediately leading the conversation to fellow leather-jacketed rockstar Joan Jett and her role in the Paul Schrader 80s rock n’ roll deep cut, Light Of Day, which inspired some mini-trivia about the actors involved and who wrote the single, “Light Of Day.”
“‘The Boss’ (Bruce Springsteen) wrote the song,” Gonnelli stated before singing the melody. “Springsteen wrote it.”
Stern replied, “Joan doesn’t write her songs.”
Filling gaps in the playlist with pop references and crowd acknowledgment—a trio of Iggy Pop-centered jokes required some audience participation—Stern and Co. ably worked through the post-Comeback single “Sixteen”, “Vibrational Match” from Stern’s 2007 debut, In Advance of the Broken Arm and the necessary live staple “The Crippled Jazzer,” whose dizzying and percussive time-signature provides ample jam opportunities and dependable show outro. This time, though, they ended with a cover:
“Does anyone have a cowbell app?”
A rendition of Blue Oyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” was the evening’s closer, garage-evocative looseness with Stern’s signature staccato notes chopping up the melody. After an FM rock staple shut things down, a t-shirt was acquired along with a big thank you to Stern for the gig.
Slow Fiction
SPRINTS
The Foundry at The Fillmore
Philadelphia, PA
9/27/24
It’s a rare instance when I’m only slightly acquainted with the band I’m seeing.
I was invited by a friend to see Dublin-based garage rock quartet SPRINTS. Having burned through a number of months since the band released their debut LP, Letter To Self, I’ll admit that the album fell out of my sightline and I’d unfortunately failed to brush up on it before the evening’s performance. I wasn’t going into this necessarily blind, but squinty for sure.
Show opener Slow Fiction were already well into their set when we arrived at The Foundry, a modest venue attached to the much larger Fillmore. Appealing hooks and sharp corners, Slow Fiction’s dance with propulsion and melody kept the crowd engaged.
I paid $15 for a Yards on tap. After that, my wallet leaned me toward a sober evening.
Enter SPRINTS: the charismatic and captivating Karla Chubb (guitarist / vocalist) promptly informed us all that the prior evening’s Boston crowd had failed to meet our evidently positive response. So, she won Philly’s heart very quickly.
SPRINTS is rock n’ roll. Via the POV that many of us have been sold relating to the irrelevance of rock music and guitar bands, I’m perfectly fine to accept this lie if it enables bands like SPRINTS to do what they do without commercial intervention. I had a blast watching them play and the live experience enhanced my appreciation for the album. Those songs sounded better live than recorded.
Additional to how well the band plays, their presence on stage is also gripping. Heavy moments (“Letter To Self,” “Shaking Their Hands”) were balanced well with near-anthemic ones (“Literary Mind,” “Up And Comer”), mutual support at play between the band through nods and smiles and Chubb’s tireless physicality. I hadn’t seen a mic twirled in some time.
The song “Feast,” a recent non-album single from the band, was also performed that evening, a theological provocation adding social gravity to their platform.
My copy of Letter To Self by SPRINTS autographed by Karla Chubb.
Michael Beach
Tropical Fuck Storm
The First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia
Philadelphia, PA
10/1/24
This would be my first time seeing Tropical Fuck Storm perform and I hadn’t been to the Church in a while. When I arrived at the venue, I took my place in line and awaited entry. There were stairs to descend, proof of purchase to provide, and then an immediate and involuntary beeline to the front of the stage, which was blanketed by an alphabet carpet whose oversized letters were obscured by drum components, erected guitars showcased in their stands, stacked amplifiers, and snaked and commingling networks of cables all leading to plugs and pedals. Even without the performers, the stage looked busy.
The opener that evening was Michael Beach, a rather professorial looking gent who exhibited the sort of lo-fi, hook-laden, callused melodies that would appeal to fans of psych-addled garage rock or for those whose ears revolve around Violent Femmes or The Velvet Underground. Playing as a three-piece, Beach was a restless and engaging performer, as pleased with the crowd as they seemed to be with him. I was unaware of Beach’s music prior to that evening, so I’d made note to myself following his performance to pick up some of his music at the merch table before I left the venue. I enjoyed his set quite a bit.
The members of Tropical Fuck Storm (vocalist / guitarist Gareth Liddiard, bassist / vocalist Fiona Kitschin, guitarist /keyboardist Lauren Hammel, and drummer Erica Dunn) were met with applause as they walked onstage and got situated. A quick and enthusiastic crowd acknowledgement from Hammel set the show on course.
With a band as rhythmically pronounced, expressly atonal, and of biting and acerbic observation as Tropical Fuck Storm, I find that their albums have required from me deep and distraction-free listening. This is absolutely the case with their 2018 debut, A Laughing Death In Meatspace, which, as I’ve gotten older and more jaded, counts as one of the rare occasions when an album impressed me enough that I struggled to identify a comparable reference point. When the crooked guitar line of “Chameleon Paint” took shape it was clear that the band’s live presentation would translate well from their recorded one.
Swathes of dissonance would act interlude between songs like “Antimatter Animals”, “Ann” and “You Let My Tyres Down”, the band’s sonic identifier generating impenetrable walls of sound that would be shed like a second skin once the notes were bent into melodies. Dunn was visibly having sound issues, an amplifier on her left seeming the culprit, but kept the rhythm in place, her style physically emphatic and rather absorbing to watch as she performed.
I’ll admit that the moments of banter weren’t that easy to decipher, normally a quivering guitar line or stream of feedback at full volume beneath any vocal crowd engagement from Hammel and Liddiard. Plus, thick Australian accents and loud mics.
A highpoint for me personally was witnessing a live rendition of “Rubber Bullies”, one of my personal favorite TFS tracks. A fun and loosely composed cover of The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” closed out the evening.
Dirty Art Club
Duster
Franklin Music Hall (formerly, The Electric Factory)
Philadelphia, PA
10/4/24
Bad crowd. Bad sound.
Having grown up outside of Philly and enjoyed live performances via many of the city’s venues over the years, the Electric Factory was always a dubious location to witness a gig due to sound. The hope was, at least on my end, that when the Electric Factory was acquired by The Bowery Presents and renamed Franklin Music Hall that the building’s acoustic flaws would be fixed. This Duster gig confirmed that those flaws remain.
A slight digression: I saw Descendents and Circle Jerks play the Franklin Music Hall earlier this year. Since atmospherics and tone aren’t really a draw for hardcore, the amplified rush of fast-pace punk rock suited the venue well enough. For Duster, though, ethereal slow-core emits too much of an enveloping noise factor.
I do not blame the band: Again, this is the risk you take when you see a gig at the venue formerly known as The Electric Factory.
The evening’s opener was Dirty Art Club, a DJ whose stage presence simply required him to exhibit a mild nod to the beats he’d recorded as he stood behind two laptops while some colorful visuals were shown on a big and bright screen that acted backdrop. It’s possible that DJ sets just aren’t for me.
As DAC’s propulsive and bass-throbbing sounds filled the hall, a very loud audience member yammering with authority about nothing insightful or interesting somehow competed with the performance. When it comes to shows, there’s always one asshole who believes that they’re central to their own living movie about them, which casts that rest of us as simply incidental and exempt of courtesy.
For Duster’s part in the evening, there wasn’t much by way of crowd acknowledgment aside from the occasional nod or smile. Another audience member convinced of their own ability to entertain a crowd kept yelling “Play one more!” after each song, eventually told by said crowd to “shut up”. Evidently they had not been won over by a repeated joke.
Again, some elements of their performance were swallowed by the relative cacophony propagated by the room. I was having difficulty hearing vocals over the playing, which itself sounded muddy. Tracks like “Inside Out” and “Topical Solution” garnered warm responses and light movement. From the band and audience alike, I read “understated, but appreciated”.
Godcaster
Osees
Union Transfer
Philadelphia, PA
10/26/24
Until I approached the ticket counter to grab my tickets, I didn’t realize the evening’s Osees / Godcaster gig was sold out.
Any visit from the always frenetic, dual-percussive, and two-car garage psych marvels Osees deserves my hard-earned green without hesitation, precisely because I know how my eyes and ears will be treated. John Dwyer and Co.’s rapid-fire buzz, hoot, and howl elate and enchant, ear-rupturing mayhem forcing all humans in attendance to bounce in unison or climb one another like some general admission Everest.
I fucking love Osees gigs.
NYC-based Godcaster warmed up, an animated sextet exhibiting flamboyance-iced peripheral rock with some progressive ideas and deep low-end. I acquired the band’s Saltergasp EP a few years ago, so I’m acquainted enough with how far they go to color outside the lines musically speaking. That said, I didn’t expect them to cover Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him.” In the context of the rest of their set, this inclusion made sense.
As pre-show ritual, Dwyer lights sage or incense and smudges the stage. As drum kit assembly and necessary plugs and instruments were set in place, Dwyer carefully maneuvered around the network of cords and stage worker traffic to complete this practice.
Not too long afterward, the light static of engaged electric instruments was broadcast just before the band launched itself into chugging, serrated bliss, the array of visible heads facing the stage now an undulated mass of fused bodies providing a makeshift platform for crowd surfers. Beer cans were flung, jets of amber liquid violently splayed from their containers, and glow necklaces were whipped across the venue. After Osees introduced themselves with a snippet of a Pink Floyd cover, “Plastic Plant” gifted the psychedelic squeal that instigated audience reaction. A burning rendition of “The Static God,” thankfully an apparent crowd pleaser and one of my absolute favorite Osees tracks, somehow inspired a more frenzied response.
This climate was kept to peak levels for most the gig: “Funeral Solution”’s hurried onslaught, the sharp-cornered riffs in “I Come From The Mountain”, “Toe Cutter - Thumb Buster”’s rhythmic bounce…
Dwyer at one point decided to take a dive into the crowd himself, realizing once he was back onstage that he may or may not have inflicted head trauma to an audience member with his knee. As penance, Dwyer offered allowance of a swift kick to the balls.
A couple jam sessions also ensued, the midway points of “Encrypted Bounce” and “C” offering extended opportunities for the band’s drummers to stretch out and test coordination while Dwyer added embellishments.
Toward the end of their set, observing yet another ritual, some bottles of beer were procured by Dwyer, a drumstick used to pop the caps, and then handed to each band member as they continued to play. Once the set was ended, Dwyer confirmed that the band’s yearly residency at UT would continue for 2025.
I stood in line for the merch table and eventually bought a t-shirt.
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
